Bog Post #1, June 24, 2014
I am very far from being a Luddite. I use all sorts of tech, in my life and in my classrooms. I believe strongly that tech has the ability to bring new tools, oceans of information, and amplified individualized instruction to my teaching.
However.
The tech has to work. It has to be easy and intuitive. I have a lesson to teach, and it is not about the technology - the technology is the canvas my students are going to work on. If making the tech work becomes their major cognitive focus, my lesson about...Bunker Hill, for example, becomes purely secondary. What they will remember about the exercise is that they were on the computer.
What I remember about this exercise so far is that I was on the computer.
I have a printer, so I printed the instructions for setting up a Blogger blog, and embedding it into my Google Site. Flipping back and forth between screens to read the instructions doesn't work very well for me.The Blogger set up pages that I got did not look anything like the screen capture pages in the instructions. I figured it out, but this is important: If this were an exercise I was doing with a middle school class, and I had given them the instructions I was working with, we'd be done right there. With the instructions not matching what they saw on the screen, the rest of the period would be spent giving one on one, step by step instructions to every single child in the class.
A few of the more intellectually advanced students would figure it out in spite of the mismatched instructions, and I could press one or two of them into service showing others. Most of the students would bog down, hands in the air. Their hands would go up again at every single step that looked or read differently from the instructions. The lowest quartile of my class would simply stop working and talk instead, or open a new screen and play Mongolian Death Worm (or whatever). Class would end, and only half of the kids would have successfully created a blog, and of that half, perhaps five would have been able to move on to the exercise I had in mind for them.
So that's an issue.
Wordle did not work for me. It led me through all the steps to create the image. I spent some time picking out just the right text to include, pasted it, and clicked create....and it didn't work. Wordle wanted me to download Java Runtime. My computer wouldn't do it. Firefox gave me this message: "Important: Firefox has stopped the Java plugin from running automatically because of security issues. However, you can still use Java on trusted sites." Inquiring further of Wordle, I got this page here:
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So. That's game over with a middle school class, or even most high school classes. Class is now about futzing around with the firewalls on our tablets (and I can practically hear the anguished moans of my IT guys if I even allowed a class to do this with school tablets or laptops). I wasn't going to do this because a) I had other options, and b) Wordle had already salted my computer with pop-ups, so it was not, in fact, a "trusted site". Wordle was a wash.
Moving on to Tagxedo, things went smoother. Walking a sixth grade class through the process would still take a class period (including word selection, typing, etc). The kids would be able to figure it out. I created the graphic below, from a biography of one of the people whose history will come up in my critical task.
Technology in the classroom is fantastic, when it works. When it doesn't it's incredibly counterproductive, to student learning, and to classroom management. I speak from painful experience. As to the educational value of Wordle/Tagxedo, I don't think there is much, at least not in my discipline (Social Studies). I liked Prof. Drolet's suggestion regarding using it as a way for students to check word repetition in their writing. That would be a cool exercise. Barring that, however, I see this as the electronic equivalent of a "make a poster" assignment: there's not a lot of learning value in relation to the amount of time a student invests in the exercise. The students spend most of their time getting the bubble letters in the title just right, and adding glitter, and the lesson content is relegated to something they just have to copy on to it. Working with Social Studies content, I think I would have them write Quizlet tests and test each other instead, or use some other application with more academic punch.
